The Persecution of Christians in America

Robert Spencer

The controversy over the Ten Commandments monument in Alabama is just the tip of the iceberg. For decades Christianity has been on the defensive in America, and it's gotten so bad now that many of our public institutions are actively anti-Christian.

In Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity, David Limbaugh uncovers a mountain of evidence of large-scale, across-the-board discrimination against Christians in the public and academic spheres--accompanied by an alarming determination on the part of the left to eradicate Christian influences from our culture and even our history.

Limbaugh points out trenchantly that the Constitution nowhere mandates a "wall of separation between church and state," but that hasn't stopped activist liberal judges from using a highly politicized interpretation of Constitutional law to do nothing less than wage war against our common culture and traditions.

But that war isn't restricted only to the courts. Limbaugh documents concerted anti-Christian activity across the spectrum of modern life: in public schools, universities, and textbooks that denigrate or ignore Christianity, in wrangles over the presence of Christian symbols on government property, in the muzzling of public officials, in public attacks on churches and Christians, and even in attempts to drive Christianity out of the public activities of private enterprises.

Persecution's chapters on public schools are positively hair-raising. Sex education programs in schools have promoted, not prevented, sexual promiscuity among teenagers--but along with libertinism goes paganism.

Limbaugh reports that public schools all over the nation have instituted "death education" programs, which led at least one student to consider suicide. Students in one school participated in a pagan Mexican ritual that involves worshipping the dead; in another, they completed exercises out of a workbook that told them, "you and your classmates will become Muslims."

Public education, argues Limbaugh with a common sense that's refreshing in today's muddled and politicized church-state debate, "inevitably teaches values." But when the source of those values--which for the Founding Fathers and most of our nation's history was Christianity--is removed, something else will have to fill the vacuum.

Now, "all too often those values are not those of the parents but of education bureaucrats whose values and ideas can be very different from what parents want for their children." The anti-Christian bias in schools and colleges has become so pervasive, says Limbaugh, that not only Christian professors and teachers, but even Christian sports coaches have been targeted for removal by administrators.

In contrast to all this, Limbaugh explores the Christian influence on America's colonial culture and schools, where the Bible was routinely used as a textbook, and the Christian ethos pervaded the work of the Founding Fathers--and invested early state constitutions. These constitutions, he explains, "based their authority on the Christian religion."

Nor were they anomalies. Limbaugh brings to light some fascinating scholarly findings that demonstrate that the philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were not and could not have been derived from pagan Greek or neo-pagan Enlightenment philosophies, as is almost universally believed today.

Rather, according to Limbaugh, "only in the Bible are the components of the Declaration's phrase, 'all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator (singular) with certain unalienable rights' present. It is a biblical concept (Genesis) that God created man in His image and likeness. Only because of this are all men entitled to equal treatment and unalienable rights. The Greeks, apparently, did not subscribe to the doctrine of equality or equal rights, and neither did the Romans."

At the same time, he shows how government officials, with breathtaking hypocrisy, have actively endorsed non-Christian values while claiming that Constitutional restrictions preclude them from according Christianity the same treatment.

The media slyly smears Christian conservatives by calling bomb-throwing radical Muslims "fundamentalists" and even "the religious right." And while it trumpets victims of racial and anti-homosexual "hate crimes," it glosses over crimes against Christians (as well as pro-life victims and victims of homosexual violence). Most media talking heads even failed to mention the fanatical anti-Christian statements of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Hollywood, meanwhile, has come along for the ride, trafficking in portrayals of Christians as ignorant and repressive -- not to mention crazy, perverted, and downright evil.

Films that portray Christianity positively, meanwhile, are consigned to critical oblivion. Limbaugh quotes Ron Maxwell, producer of the Civil War epic Gods and Generals, on the campaign against that film, which conservatives and Christians have hailed: "Look, I've had thirty-two years in the business," says Maxwell. "I've read a lot of reviews, and some of them are funny and dismissive. But I've never seen an effort [like this] to actually suppress a movie, to scare people away from it."

The import of Persecution is clear: Limbaugh doesn't just document anti-religious sentiment, but a web of activity that is specifically anti-Christian.

It's interesting that as our nation's Christian heritage is being fed to the lions today, our public officials and major media outlets (as I document in my book Onward Muslim Soldiers) are falling over themselves to lionize the religion of the global network of terrorists who are bent on destroying America: Islam. Anti-Christianity, it seems, makes strange bedfellows.